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Sprint projectOct 23, 2026

Coordination Scores, Realised Outcomes and Metric Integrity in Archived LLM Auctions

Kanishq Gandharv

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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A coordination score is not the same as a realised market outcome. This study audits that distinction in 75 archived model-driven double-auction sessions, covering 2,250 rounds and 4,111 trades. We recompute prices, trade counts, seller profit and buyer surplus from the authors' round logs and verify the results against their cached metrics. Each full session is the statistical unit. After accounting for ten experimental conditions, the archived judge coordination score has a modest positive correlation with trade-weighted price (r = 0.230; session-bootstrap 95% interval 0.056 to 0.409), while its association with total seller profit is uncertain (r = -0.083; interval -0.315 to 0.130). Separately, a source-code audit identifies a normalization error in the archived profit Gini metric. All 75 stored values match the faulty expression and exceed one; an independent pairwise calculation yields values between 0.0046 and 0.3508. The price and profit analysis does not use this metric. The contribution is a reproducible reanalysis and metric audit of existing experiments, not new model generation or a validated collusion detector. The results motivate checking executed outcomes and metric invariants alongside fallible model judgments before interpreting collusion evidence.

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Cite this project

@misc{gandharv2026coordination,
  title = {{Coordination Scores, Realised Outcomes and Metric Integrity in Archived LLM Auctions}},
  author = {Kanishq Gandharv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/coordination-scores-realised-outcomes-and-metric-integrity-in-archived-llm-auctions-834r}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/coordination-scores-realised-outcomes-and-metric-integrity-in-archived-llm-auctions-834r}
}

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